Introduction to Game Development (Second Edition) Review

Introduction to Game Development 2nd Edition - Steve Rabin

Introduction to Game Development is a book in the vein of the Game Programming Gems series, it consists of a collection of articles written by game industry veterans (Steve Rabin, Noel Llopis, Eric Lengyel, etc.) with the  aim of providing a solid overall introduction to the game development industry from all its various aspects, be they engineering, art or business based. Calling this a book is a bit misleading, it is more of a tome, this  hardcover 1000 page monster is extremely detailed and comprehensive for what you would expect just looking at the cover.

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Video Game Optimization Review

Video game optimization by Eric Preisz and Ben Garney is a book that is focused on highlighting and addressing performance concerns found in modern video games. This is probably the best code optimization book that I have ever read. It is also the only book on the market that covers the entire game development programming pipeline from start to finish and is the only book I know of with a heavy focus on GPU and Shader optimization. In brief this this book fills an important gap in any game dev’s library and is an absolute gem.

Game Coding Complete (Third Edition) Review

Game Coding Complete 3rd Edition - Mike McShaffry

I first heard of this book when it won the Game Developer Magazine book of the year award, I kinda made a note to get hold of it and then kinda forgot about it. I only remembered about it when it popped up in my amazon recommended books newsletter and I pulled the trigger on it.

This book is written primarily by Mike McShaffry (who spent years working for origin on the Ultima games) with a few chapters by guest authors. It aims to cover the A to Z of game programming in one book and in that regard it both succeeds and fails. The book is targeted at beginners and I guess for me that was my the biggest issue.

Game Engine Architecture Review

Game Engine Architecture - Jason Gregory

I’ve toyed around with building a very simple game engine over the last few months and made some progress in regards to the renderer of the engine but unfortunately during development, for every question I answered another 10 sprung up, with every new question and my frustration grew, and after the third re-planning of the engine core and the 4th rewrite, I gave into my frustration and just threw the engine on the back burner. Now why didnt I just get a book on game engines and move on from there, well I’ve read a few books on the topic of designing and creating game engines in the past, and they left me severely unimpressed and jaded, possibly some of the biggest wastes of paper out there  and I guess that’s one of the reasons I avoided looking for a new book on the topic and just gave up.

Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming By Wendy Jones – Review

A search of amazon.com in regards to directx10 books yields only three entries: Wendy Jones’ book, a book by peter Walsh which by all account is just a basic update of his previous directx9 book and recently a new book by frank luna which also seems just like an update of a previous book.

I purchased Wendy Jones’ book: Beginning DirectX 10 Game Programming in January of this year and have only recently had the time to sit and go through it. In brief I wasn’t very impressed. This book is nothing more than a rehash of the tutorials available in the DX10 sdk, and to make matters worse you would think that she’d make an effort to improve upon the tutorials, that there would perhaps be more depth and clarity,  unfortunately she doesn’t.